Suggestions in British and American English: A Corpus-Linguistic Study

Abstract

This article examines the surface realisations of the speech act of suggesting in two national varieties of English, British and American English. More specifically, it analyses and compares the head act realisations of the speech act and its internal and external devices of modification across the two speaker groups. The study is based on corpus data retrieved in automated searches from two corpora of English. The analysis reveals that despite general similarities, the two data sets differ in frequency distribution of head acts and their modification. Furthermore, the results show that the surface realisations used to encode suggestions are functionally ambiguous in that they can also be used to realise other illocutions, such as requests or orders. The paper therefore calls for the inclusion of the hearer perspective in pragmatics research to fathom out how hearers are able to infer speaker meaning. Gaining knowledge about how intention is identified will also help to improve inter-rater reliability in coding data and annotating corpora for pragmatic units.

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